Back in the picture

'Can you please put Kylie into the photo with her cousins?" a
relative asked me one day. "She was asleep when it was taken."

I love a challenge.

Digital cameras usually come with basic image editing programs
but pasting Kylie into a photo is beyond basic.

Time to bring out GIMP, the
GNU Image Manipulation Program. This free software, developed for
Windows, Mac and Linux, has many of the capabilities of costly
commercial image editing packages.

It can adjust exposure, colouring, sharpness and blurring of a
photo, and more.

I took a shot of people enjoying their new pergola on a sunny
day. The sky and the house were exposed perfectly, but the people -
in the shade of the pergola - were hard to make out in the shadows.
GIMP can be used to alter parts of a photo rather than the whole
image.

Using the program, I could carefully select the bits of the
image that were under the pergola. I used a combination of
automatic selection and "painting over what you want to
select".

By selecting only the sections in shadow, I isolated them from
the rest of the photo and used GIMP to adjust the properties only
for those bits. Doing this, I could lighten the people and
furniture while not touching the sky or house. The results looked
great.

Two other key tools were needed for the mission. The first was
layers. Think of these as being clear, plastic sheets upon which
photos are printed (inside GIMP). If you have one photo and copy
another one in over the top, you will have two layers; the original
image and the new one. The new one will be "on top" and will block
out the old image. But we can fix that.

Layers are independent of each other. You can shrink, move,
rotate or edit one layer without touching the others.

Masks are used with layers. Think of your photos as being on
clear plastic (the layers), then imagine this: the background image
(layer one) is a beach. You have a photo of two people in their
lounge room that you want to manipulate so that they appear to be
on the beach.

Use GIMP to paste their photo "over" the beach as layer two, and
they will block out the beach.

But, with masking, you can "scrape off" parts of the people
photo to reveal the beach behind - or under - them, similar to
scratching the paint from the clear plastic to show what's
underneath.

Made a mistake and removed part of the person? Just reverse the
process. Nothing has been deleted and all you've done is told GIMP
which part of the bottom layer is masked by the top layer. Click an
icon and you are painting back the people.

So I had all the tools to add in Kylie. I found another photo of
her, and selected and pasted her as a separate layer over the image
of her cousins. I shrank her image to make it appear in scale and
then moved her.

I then used a mask to make the cousins' image appear in a gap
between her arm and body. Finally, I darkened, then blurred her and
even added some digital speckles to match the quality of the
cousins' image.

Most people could not spot the trickery; it looked as if she
really was there.

GIMP is not as fast or flashy as the commercial packages and
some people find its layout confusing. Being open-source software,
there is a solution; GIMPShop. A
graphics tablet is highly recommended for any version of GIMP.